Distribution: Making your movie available

By DTL
Posted October 21, 2010

Today, making a professional-quality movie independently is within the reach of anyone with a middle-class income. But getting it seen is still the tough nut to crack. For as far back as I can remember, the complaint has always been that big American distribution companies have locked up all the available venues, and it’s impossible for a Canadian movie to get bookings in the local GoogolPlex. Indeed, this has been the complaint of Canadian movie-makers for a hundred years.

Fortunately, avenues for distribution have multiplied. With an ever-increasing number of cable channels, and with Web distribution becoming the definite future, there’s never been such an insatiable need for content.

Right now, it’s never been so easy to make a movie, and it’s never been so easy to place your movie before an audience. It’s an exciting time!

Alas, getting paid for a movie is still more dream than reality . . .

Film festivals

The first (and often only) distribution plan most independent movie-makers have is, “We’ll enter film festivals and someone will offer us a distribution deal.” As recently as the last decade, you could take a movie to a film festival and hope to land a distribution deal (if you actively pursued one). Those days are gone. It is more fruitful to treat film festivals as part of the movie’s distribution strategy.

It can make a movie seem more “real” if the poster boasts, “As seen at the Such-and-Such Film Festival”. And it’s even better if the festival has a competition and you can put on the poster “Winner of the Fig Newton Award at the Cookie Crumbles Film Festival”. (Though be careful! Too many laurels from festivals nobody’s heard of smacks of résumé-padding and diminishes your credibility.)

It’s best of all if you can boast of being accepted into a film festival that people have actually heard of. As a newbie or independent movie-maker, you’re probably not going to get into TIFF or Cannes or Sundance; dream big, but be realistic in expending your limited resources.

The key is not to be passive, and count on the festival for promotion, but to solicit some media attention for the movie yourself. Local media are probably already planning to cover the festival as part of their arts coverage, so you have an opening.

Newspapers are always desparate for content — especially the free-circulation weeklies that every city has; they always need copy to separate the ads. Local radio stations like to interview movie-makers — cast and crew — for that peek behind the scenes. (Those can even be done remotely, by phone or VOIP.)

You will get the most out of a film festival by attending in person. Offering a Q&A with the cast and / or crew (or members thereof) can entice a larger audience than the movie alone would. Audiences like the behind-the-scenes access, and distributors like well-attended screenings.

And work the festival! Nobody will be a better advocate for your movie than you will. You must be not only social, but aggressively social! If you are an introvert, save up your spoons and force yourself. Don’t think of it as “networking”, which often means “using other people to advance yourself”, but rather as a combination of you auditioning, and in turn auditioning for, potential collaborators. You’re right there with peole who are your colleagues, and perhaps your competitors; you’re on the scene with other people who love movies. This is your world! Make the most of it.

And when submitting to a festival, do pay attention to the festivals’ rules and criteria. (An individual who has sat on juries for Canada Council grants once told me that the number-one thing that gets an application round-filed is that the applicant didn’t follow the application instructions.) You don’t want to submit your 66-minute movie to a festival that specifies that feature-length entries must be a minimum of 75 minutes. Don’t waste their time and yours.

There are film festivals in every province and territory in Canada — some big, some small. The big ones like VIFF get lots of entries, so the chances of getting in are small — but hey, don’t let me dissuade you from trying. It’s good to target a festival or two in each province (in order around the calendar year). Here are a few:

• Available Light Film Festival (Whitehorse, YT) is in February.
• Victoria Film Festival (Victoria, BC) is in February.
• Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival (Vancouver, BC) is in February.
• Kingston Canadian Film Festival (Kingston, ON) is in early March.
• Canada International Film Festival (Vancouver, BC) is in March.
• Canadian Film Fest (Toronto, ON) is in late March.
• Calgary Underground Film Festival (Calgary, AB) is in mid-April.
• Yorkton Film Festival (Yorkton, SK) is in late May.
• Niagara Indie Film Fest (St. Catharines, ON) is in June.
• Prince Edward Island International Film Festival (Charlottetown, PEI) is in early July.
• Gimli Film Festival (Gimli, MB) is in July.
• Fantasia International Film Festival (Montreal, QC) is in July.
• Toronto International Film Festival (Toronto, ON) is in early September.
• Saint Andrews Film Festival (Saint Andrews, NB) is in early September.
• CineFest Sudbury (Sudbury, ON) is in September.
• The World Film Festival (Montreal, QC) is in September.
• Atlantic Film Festival (Halifax, NS) is in September.
• Calgary International Film Festival (Calgary, AB) is in late September.
• Edmonton International Film Festival (Edmonton, AB) is in late September.
• Dark Bridges Film Festival (Saskatoon, SK) is in late September.
• Bay Street Film Festival (Thunder Bay, ON) is in early October.
• Festival du Nouveau Cinema (Quebec City, QC) is in October.
• Vancouver International Film Festival (Vancouver, BC) is in October.
• Banff Mountain Festival (Banff, AB) is in early November.
• Hamilton Film Festival (Hamilton, ON) is in November.
• Whistler Film Festival (Whistler, BC) is in early December.

And, of course, WithoutABox (owned by IMDb, which is owned by Amazon) lets you submit to thousands of festivals all over the world, and gives you a listing (and a place to upload the trailer, or even the whole movie) on IMDb as well.

Theatrical release

A wide theatrical release is not something you can do for your movie independently. You need a professional distributor who already does business in that world.

If you manage to land a deal with a distributor, that may or may not include a theatrical release. Many aspiring movie-makers almost fetishize seeing their movies on the big screen, but distributors won’t spend money on your ego. They will make the decision based on the movie’s predicted ROI.

If you can’t land a deal for theatrical exhibition, there are smaller-scale DIY options.

You can “four-wall it”, as some independent movie-makers did as recently as the 1970s. They would pile their film cannisters into their car and drive from city to city, wherever they could book a screening at an independent theatre or auditorium or church basement. It was kind of like being on the road with your indie band.

Today that route needn’t be as literal. You can book venues and arrange publicity and send out copies of your movie from your own desk. There are even networks that facilitate this.

But ask yourself if a theatrical release is for your movie’s benefit, or your own. If your project can make a splash in your home town, it may be worth renting a theatre and holding a red-carpet premiere; that could pay off in media coverage, merchandise sales, or reputation. But does your movie really need a theatrical release? Let the numbers decide.

Home-video release

Back in the early decades of home video, there was a definite stigma against straight-to-video releases. They were suspect, like self-published books — “What, you couldn’t get a real company to take your work?”

Then for a while there, home video became an important part of how Hollywood made its money . . . and also offered a viable venue for independent movies. Independent movie-makers were able to make a bit of money by selling their movies on DVD.

In just the past couple of years, the DVD and Blu-ray market has gone soft (sales of discs declined 13 percent in 2009) — but again, that’s no reason not to pursue that avenue. Movie enthusiasts will always want to own their favourite titles, and casual viewers will take a chance if you can keep the price low enough.

Retail distributors (and most stores) won’t take discs that you burn yourself, so you have to have them manufactured by a DVD-replication company. (Forget about releasing your movie on Blu-Ray disc. You have to pay a $3,000 USD fee to AACS just to use their format, before you’ve spent a dime on actually getting discs manufactured.) There are places that offer a DVD in a standard keepcase with lable for about $1.40 per disc in quantities as low as 1,000 (of course, as you order more, the cost per unit goes down). (And don’t forget: If you’re selling DVDs through the retail stream, it’s vitally important that you print a barcode on them.)

Don’t count on getting the retail price! Stores will take 40 to 50 percent of the cover price. If you’re going through a distributor, you might have to be prepared for an even bigger bite — between 50 and 65 percent off the retail price (that way the distributor can take a cut, and still sell to the retailer for 40 to 50 percent of cover price).

On past self-distributed projects, I’ve had better luck placing items with smaller, independent stores than I have with chains — although, surprisingly, Chapters often welcomes independent stuff. The same goes with video-rental places; often the smaller indie place is more welcoming than, say, Blockbuster (who, rumour has it, is applying for bankruptcy protection).

Currently Netflix allows you to submit a movie to be considered for distribution through their catalogue. Don’t expect that avenue to remain open forever!

Online distribution

Distributing movies over the Internet is definitely the wave of the future, as broadband access grows every more ubiquitous. Some recent surveys revealed that people don’t want a 3D TV as much as they want an Internet-connected TV; people want to watch video content from the ’Net on their living-room televisions rather than their computer screens.

This could be a major end-run around the domination of movie screens by the large American distributors. There are only a limited number of physical screens and theatres, but there is unlimited room for videos on the Internet. And distributing online is an excellent way to take advantage of the “long tail” for video sales. For minimal cost, you can keep your movie online and “in print” for new movie fans to discover.

Netflix now distributes more movies over the Internet than it does physical discs-by-mail. Their CEO said recently, “By every measure we are now primarily a streaming company that also offers DVD-by-mail.”

YouTube allows you to upload full-length movies in 15-minute parts — or, if you become a “partner”, in one piece and for money. A pal of mine who’s an Internet-marketing consultant says that top-earning Partners in this city earn over six figures a year. Of course that’s atypical, but it does show that it is possible to make money just from YouTube.

There are many video-hosting sites: Vimeo, BlipTV, MetaCafe, Atom, and others large and small. I already mentioned that IMDb allows you to put your trailer or your full movie online.

One thing to watch with video-hosting services is the User Agreement. For example, if you post a movie on YouTube or Facebook, you give Facebook the non-exclusive and irrevocable right to do anything with that video that they want. In all likelihood, nothing will happen because of such an agreement. But legally, if the movie becomes an unexpected hit, they could sell their own DVD version in competition with yours — and keep all the money.

And you know that any movie you make is going to wind up on The Pirate Bay. It’s wise to pre-empt this by making your own BitTorrent version and putting it on all the major BitTorrent sites. That way, you know the rip is good; the colour is correct, the audio is in synch. And you can include a little advertisement: “If you enjoyed this movie, send a few bucks to . . . ” Better yet, if you can offer some kind of value-add that’s not easily piratable itself, you can increase orders — something like “If you order the official DVD, you’ll get a poster autographed to you personally by the entire cast and crew.”

Attracting an audience

The key to success with all these avenues is to avoid the “If you build it, they will come” attitude — ’cause they won’t. Once your movie is available, you have to draw people’s attention to it by promoting it!

But that’s a subject for a future post.